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Wednesday, February 22, 2017

The Alluring Falsehood of Socialism

The fundamental flaw in socialism is that it tacitly accepts the authority of the King and promotes that instead of community in particular and at the expense of community which forces out the individual too easily.

With that you have what is an attractive bundle of intentions along with a surfeit of expensive rent seekers attempting to justify their incomes. This is obvious and wrong and naturaly attracts blowback by a counter political movement to rationalise what has been created but not properly replace or improve.

Divesting authority to the natural community settles all this. Merely look at the Amish for God's sake. We can easily replicate even that and actually do much better using the rule of twelve and modern fiat banking.

Almost everyone who cares earnestly about freedom is aroused against
the Communists. But it is not only the Communists, it is in a more
subtle way the Socialists who are blocking the efforts of the free world
to recover its poise and its once-firm resistance to tyranny. In Italy,
by voting with the Communists, they ousted De Gasperi’s strong and wise
government, and they are keeping his successors weak through the menace
of similar action. In France, by refusing hearty collaboration with
“capitalist” parties, they have made it impossible to form any stable
government at all, producing just that chaos which the Communists
desire. In Germany, after doing their best to oust Adenauer and his
brilliant Minister of Economics, Ludwig Erhard, who accomplished almost
single-handed “the miracle of German recovery,” they are as this is
written opposing his plan of rearmament, which offers the sole hope of
effective West European resistance to an invading Communist army. In
England they made a recovery like that of Germany impossible; their
government recognized Communist China; and they are pushing to confirm
for all time the Communists’ hold on the impregnable land mass, or
planetary fortress, of Eurasia. In Norway they have produced the closest
imitation of an authoritarian state to be found this side of the iron
curtain.We are still beguiled by this other fairy
tale: that a group of liberal-minded reformers can take charge of the
economy and approximate a free and equal society.

In America we seem remote from all this, but it is only because the
Socialists in large numbers have abandoned the party label, adopting the
Fabian policy of infiltration in other groups. Norman Thomas has
withdrawn from the party executive and no longer functions as a
political leader. Maynard Krueger, once candidate for Vice President on
the Socialist ticket, resigned from the party, explaining that he did so
not because his beliefs had changed, but because he thought devout
American Socialists should associate themselves with the “liberal-labor
coalition inside and just outside the Democratic party.” This
liberal-labor coalition has already transformed the Democratic party
from an organ of Jeffersonian resistance to centralized power into the
recognized advocate of increasing state control. It played a major part
in the follies of Yalta, Teheran, Potsdam, and the China Story, which
gave away well-nigh half the world to the Communists.

Thus in America as elsewhere it is the socialist ideal, as surely as
the communist implementation of it, that is working against freedom. To
thoughtful Americans Lenin’s notion that a tiny group of detached
zealots calling themselves the vanguard of the working class, after
seizing the power and “smashing the bourgeois state,” could establish a
dictatorship of the proletariat—or any dictatorship but their own—has
grown to seem preposterous. And the belief that such a dictatorship,
having taken charge of the economy of a country, could lead the way to a
classless society in which all men would be free and equal, is getting
difficult even to remember. When remembered it is seen to be what it
is—a dangerous fairy tale.

But we are still beguiled by this other fairy tale: that a large
group of liberal-minded reformers, not pretending to be a class, not
seizing the power but creeping into it, not smashing the state but
bending it to their will, can take charge of the economy and approximate
a free and equal society. This second notion is really more utopian
than the first. The bolshevik scheme at least designated a social force
which was to carry the process through. It looked scientific to say that
the working class, once the existing order was smashed, would conduct
the economy without paying tribute to capital, and a classless society
would thus result from the natural instincts of men. The belief that
such a millennium could be brought into being by “some combination of
lawyers, business and labor managers, politicians and intellectuals,” is
hard to take seriously. And yet as Lenin s pseudo-scientific dream-hope
evaporates, this more pure and perfect fantasy tends to take its place.

The phrase I quoted is from an essay contributed by Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr., to a symposium on “The Future of Socialism,” in the
Partisan Review for May-June 1947. In that essay Mr. Schlesinger defined
socialism in orthodox terms as “ownership by the state of all
significant means of production,” and declared it “quite practicable . .
. as a long term proposition.” He has said contrary things both before
and since, and it appears that these words did not express a clear or
firmly held opinion.[1] But that makes them all the better illustrate the danger I am speaking of.

This assumption, though alluringly plausible, does not happen to be true.

For it is not the copper-riveted old-time believers in Marxian theory
that we in America have to fear. Those old-timers, although calling
themselves democratic, still give lip-service to the Marxian doctrine of
progress through increasing class division. They do not seem to me
really to believe in it any longer; in the present state of class
relations in this country such a belief would require feats of mental
gymnastics for which even Marx did not prepare them. But their formal
adherence to this and the rest of the Marxian mystique isolates them in
America. Their fairy tale is not plausible enough to be dangerous. It is
the bureaucratic socializers—if I may devise that label for the
champions of a lawyer-manager-politician-intellectual revolution—who
constitute a real and subtle threat to America’s democracy. It is their
dream that is moving into focus as that of Lenin grows dim.

The assumption common to these two dreams is that society can be made
more free and equal, and incidentally more orderly and prosperous, by a
state apparatus which takes charge of the economy, and runs it
according to a plan. And this assumption, though alluringly plausible,
does not happen to be true. A state apparatus which plans and runs the
business of a country must have the authority of a business executive.
And that is the authority to tell all those active in the business where
to go and what to do, and if they are insubordinate put them out. It
must be an authoritarian state apparatus. It may not want to be, but the
economy will go haywire if it is not.

That much was foreseen by many cool-headed wise men during the
hundred-odd years since the idea of a “socialized” economy was broached.
But the world was young, and the young can not be told—they have to
learn by experience. (I was among the least willing to be told.)
However, the actual experience of state-run economies, popping up one
after another in the last thirty-five years, should be enough, it seems
to me, to bring home this simple fact to the most exuberant. It is a
fact which you can hardly fail to realize if you watch the operation of
any big factory, or bank, or department store, or any place of business
where a large number of people are at work. There has to be a boss, and
his authority within the business has to be recognized, and when not
recognized, enforced.

Even supposing elections could be genuine, you might as well explode a bomb under the economy as hold an election.

Moreover, if the business is vast and complex, his authority has to
be continuous. You cannot lift him out of his chair every little while,
tear up his plans, and stick in somebody else with a different idea of
what should be done or how it should be done. The very concept of a plan
implies continuity of control. Thus the idea that a periodic election
of the boss and managing personnel is consistent with a planned national
economy is lacking both in logic and imagination—you need only define
the word “plan,” or present a plan to your mind’s eye. The thing is
conceivable perhaps in a small enterprise, but where would you be if the
nation’s entire wealth production and distribution were a single
business? Even supposing elections could be genuine when those in office
controlled all the jobs in the country. Suppose they were genuine—you
might as well explode a bomb under the economy as hold an election.

The phony elections in totalitarian countries, the ballots with only
one party and one list of candidates, are not the mere tricks of a
cynical dictator—they are intrinsic to a state-planned economy. Either
phony elections or no elections at all—that is what thoroughgoing
socialism will mean, no matter who brings it in—hard-headed Bolsheviks,
soft-headed Social Democrats, or genteel liberals. Even now, with
government handling only a third of our national income, it took the
most popular candidate since George Washington to defeat the party in
power. Even he could not carry in a Congress heartily in opposition. How
could you unseat an administration with every enterprise and every wage
and salary in the country in its direct control? Not only private
self-interest would prevent it, and that would be a force like
gravitation, but public prudence also—patriotism! “Don’t change horses
in midstream,” we say. But we’d be in mid-stream all the time with the
entire livelihood of the nation dependent upon an unfulfilled plan in
the hands of those in office. “Don’t rock the boat” would be the eternal
slogan, the gist of political morals. That these morals would have to
be enforced by the criminal law is as certain as that mankind is man.

[1] The whole passage about how this “long term proposition” might be achieved reads as follows:

“Its gradual advance might well preserve order and law, keep enough
internal checks and discontinuities to guarantee a measure of freedom,
and evolve new and real forms for the expression of democracy. The
active agents in effecting the transition will probably be, not the
working class, but some combination of lawyers, business and labor
managers, politicians and intellectuals, in the manner of the first New
Deal, or of the labor government in Britain.”

Mr. Schlesinger was quite savagely angry at me for quoting this
passage correctly when the present essay was published in the New Leader
(June 1952). He thought I should have known that he did not mean what
he said. “In order to chime with the purposes of the symposium,” he
explained, “I chose to write as if ‘democratic socialism’ and ‘mixed
economy’ were the same. I made a mistake in so doing, as Mr. Eastman’s
confusion suggests. . . . . I am tired of Max Eastman and his present
conviction that liberty resides in the immunity of private business from
government control. I wish he would grow up . . .”

My “confusion” consisted in not having read Mr. Schlesinger’s book,
The Age of Jackson (1945), in which he “explicitly rejected the theory
of socialism,” nor yet The Vital Center (1949), in which he “explained
his rejection of socialism at length.”

I was indeed guilty of this confusion, but I have it now clear in my
head that it was only during an interlude in 1947—a strange interlude, I
must say—that Mr. Schlesinger came out explicitly for “ownership by the
state of all significant means of production,” meaning thereby a “mixed
economy.”

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Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.